“You took a pretty aggressive line down in there,” I said to Cody as he swerved up to me in the half-light whiteness at the base of the eastern Headwall.
He gave me his half giggle of fear/enjoyment. “I wasn’t strong enough to make better turns.” Meaning, despite the top of the line Volkls he was demo-ing, his four years off the slopes had sapped his muscle memory about just how to let the skis float in the crusty crud we’d found up there at 12,300’ above sea level in the Cirque.
We were one and half days into a manic dance with rental skis, hoping to find the right pair to buy him for his much deferred Christmas present. The first day, around noon, we’d given the Cirque a try, even though no new snow had fallen for days, and only about 6” in the past week. Instead of following the orange directional discs down into KT gully, we took a chance off the the right into the upper Dikes, where rocks peeked through the surface, hiding like icebergs 90% of their bulk beneath the surface.
It was a line I rarely would rarely take, especially in this sketchy snow year, due to the risk of leaving loads of P-Tex up in that Elk Mountain redoubt. The rest of the area was, to put it charitably, “skied out”. But here, only a few tracks sullied the treeless whiteness. And, down below the Headwall drop-in, the slope has a more subtle tilt, flowing smoothly through the hidden rockfall from the cliffs above. It’s about a thousand vertical feet of swooping and dancing, picking lines, chancing deeper drops and false flats, all above tree line.
Cody had been skiing literally all his life, putting on some baby slats at Mt. Rainier before his first birthday. But life events and the Great Recession had conspired to keep him from the slopes since April of 2006. I’d almost forgotten how good a skier he had become by age 25. His many years of practice, and following me around had cemented a lasting muscle memory, but four years away might calcify those connections. And he’d been further burdened by growing to 6’2”, a little tall for easy balance on the boards. It’s tough to look graceful when curving like a stork down a bumpy black diamond.
He tried five different skis in two days, looking for the right combination of stability on the steep groomers, float in soft snow, and grip on hard snow, to undergird his confidence building. Here in the Cirque, the skis couldn’t hide. Tough, grippy slab snow at the Headwall’s cornice lip; soft snow steep slope shallow bumps down the wall itself; crust and crud and soft powder randomly mixed in the rollers through the Dikes; then bombing down Green Cabin flats and steeps, newly groomed at noon. And of course finishing up with a little dipsy-doodle in Skateboard Alley. From 12.500’ down to 9800’, that one piste has it all, and if the ski can handle all of it, you really ought to buy it.
It’s really quite remarkable that we had any fresh snow to ski in. The year, El Nino dominates the weather. Storms race into Southern California, obliterating the smog, pummeling the hillsides with an year’s worth of rain in one week, piling snow into the San Gabriel mountains, burying ski lifts in the process. Racing east, mountains in New Mexico and extreme southern Colorado feel the love, with Taos and Telluride reaping heavy snowfalls. A split develops, and any storms from the Pacific Northwest get shunted around the Rockies, depriving the Central and Northern mountains of Colorado. So far this year, Vail snowpack is at 68% of average; Steamboat Springs at 55%. The Roaring Fork Valley,where we ski, gets little more at 72%.
Despite the conditions, the Ski Corp has opened the CIrque lift and associated terrain, in a vainglorious attempt to defy the obvious, assuming that, “If we’re going to charge $96 a day for skiing, then it must be good.”
Well, it’s not. But if we picked out way carefully through the glacier gouged gullies draining the top tundra of Bald Mountain, we might avoid the hidden rocks which litter the basin. On these two or three runs, we got very lucky. No one else had dared the track, the sun kept watch over our route, and we found accumulated spindrift blown up from the ridges, then falling back down as ghost snow into the hidden creek beds of the Cirque. Bonus Tracks.
The less it snows here, the more I hunger through the NOAA weather site, divining radar charts, examining infrared satellite photos of the Western US, reading the obscure dialect of the staff meteorologists, who post their notes to each other twice daily, showing just how little they actually know about the weather future more than 36 hours in advance. Storms which might promise to drop 2-4 inches of snow are greeted with the pomp and hope of, oh, a new President. Then, when they fail to materialize at all, or, worse yet, actually only deliver 3”, we see them as dismal failures, dashing our hopes and not providing the change we know we need.
Even so, I find this message, buried in the forecaster discussion this morning: “ACCUMULATIONS OF 6 TO 9 INCHES OVER NRN/CEN MTNS AND UPWARDS OF A FOOT FOR SOME AREAS OF SAN JUANS LOOK TO BE POSSIBLE BY STORMS END.” [That’s the way they write, all caps – makes their work seem so retro!] Yes! maybe there will be deliverance at last!
Or maybe the rocks we can see now will be covered by 2-3” of fluff, just enough to hide them, but not enough to protect our skis. The powder days of 2007-09, when snowpacks were 120-140% of normal, and every day was a snow day, seem that much more cruel and distant happening such a short time ago. But it is what keeps me coming back, to float and fantasize about freedom from gravity. And on just one run, in this snow dead year, Cody and I found that hope again.